Thursday, November 18, 2010

Rabbi Mayer Schiller and the Fatality of the American 'Right'

Hasidim take great pride in the ability to trick and cajole "the goyim." However, I suspect that some of the names listed below are somewhat aware of this fact and go along with the charade anyway bargaining that rabbinic association might afford them cover from the "anti-semite" bludgeon. Whatever little benefit they may receive is far outweighed by the confusion and misdirection suffered by their followers and undeserved prestige accrued to Talmud, Kabbalah and Khazar "Jews" among people who should know better.

On Columbus Day (not yet totally banned by the Thought Police as "oppressive" and "Eurocentric") I had the privilege of attending a talk by my friend and mentor Rabbi Mayer Schiller. The Rabbi is one of the leading Jewish racial realists and a leading traditionalist luminary—especially striking given that his formal secular education ended after eighth grade He spoke to a small conservative group in Manhattan about his intellectual journey through the post-war American Right. (Interested readers are welcome to email me for more detailed information about this group).

Rabbi Schiller grew up in a Brooklyn-Queens liberal Jewish family. He remembered attending international soccer games with his grandfather who refused to stand for the anthems of Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal, but sang along to "The Internationale"—the communist hymn that was then Yugoslavia’s anthem. Like many other American Jews at that time, the Rabbi’s grandfather did not see a contradiction between his pro-communist views and the fact that he was a successful businessman who would be either imprisoned or executed under the Reds.

Rabbi Schiller says he became a conservative at the age of ten after watching a documentary about Sen. Robert Taft. His views were further developed by Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative); (Rabbi Schiller later wrote The (Guilty) Conscience of a Conservative) National Review (which at that time was race-realist and opposed integration); and the John Birch Society’s American Opinion. The young Craig Schiller, as the Rabbi was known during his secular days, greeted Goldwater’s 1964 campaign with jubilant euphoria.

He was crushed when Goldwater lost—and later when, as he puts it, William F. Buckley "decided to sell out and dropped all his principles".

At this time, Rabbi Schiller became a part of the Skver Hassidic movement in Rockland County, after he and his middle school classmates had decided to try living as observant Jews for a month.

Another major transformation occurred in the Rabbi’s life at around the same time: he discovered L. Brent Bozell Jr.’s traditionalist Catholic magazine Triumph, which featured authors like Thomas Molnar and Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. He realized that traditional religious beliefs are an integral part of real conservatism. The Rabbi was so taken by Bozell and Triumph that he approached Patricia Buckley Bozell and offered to write a biography of her late husband.

Triumph writer Thomas Molnar (who passed away this July), a prolific author and a professor at Brooklyn College, Yale, and University of Budapest, was both a friend and a mentor ("a rebbe") to Rabbi Schiller. The Rabbi was a young rabbinical student when he read Molnar’s seminal The Counter-Revolution and came down to Manhattan to meet him. When the Rabbi started talking about the Constitution, Molnar cut him off with the first of many witty remarks in his charming Hungarian accent: "The Constitution? Look around you, what do these Puerto Ricans care about the Constitution?"

The Rabbi remembers Molnar as a brilliant, yet realistic Catholic reactionary who considered the words "democracy" and "capitalism" to be obscenities and ridiculed Pope John Paul II for sounding like "a southern California health store owner: it’s all about love and peace! What about Heaven and Hell?"

Molnar derided The National Review as an "empty, soulless, and faceless publication" and had no respect for the neocons.

Like other traditionalist thinkers, Molnar did not have much hope for the West. To Molnar, non-Western mass immigration was a symptom, not a cause of the West’s decline. The real problem was that the West lost its will to live. When Rabbi Schiller visited South Africa in the last months of white rule to encourage Afrikaner nationalists and demonstrate his support for them, Molnar replied: "You must encourage them to do only one thing—run away!"

Interestingly, the neocons and the ADL/$PLC thought police never bothered Molnar. Rabbi Schiller says he was too far above their level of discussion—chickens do not fly high enough to attack an eagle.

Rabbi Schiller’s affinity for traditionalist Catholicism led him to establish a warm relationship with the anti-Vatican II Society of St. Pius X (SSPX). The SSPX seminary in Ridgefield, CT invited Rabbi Schiller to speak to their seminarians on numerous occasions. And every time, the Rabbi reports, he was received with the utmost courtesy and respect. Once, a seminarian even addressed Rabbi Schiller as "Father". The seminarians held the Rabbi in such high regard that, before Archbishop Lefebvre was to consecrate several SSPX priests as bishops in defiance of Rome, they sought out the Rabbi to ask his opinion on the matter.

The late Joe Sobran was another pious Catholic friend of Rabbi Schiller. The Rabbi remembers Joe as a kind, sweet, and humble man who was a brilliant analyst yet managed to be very funny in his prose. Unlike Molnar and Rabbi Schiller, Sobran still believed in political activism. But Rabbi Schiller recognized, like others, that Joe Sobran’s heart and mind were engaged by questions of immigration and race.

With regards to Sobran’s views on the Jews and Israel, the Rabbi believes that Sobran’s criticism of the former only arose as a result of Buckley’s and the neocons’ hysterical reaction to his criticism of the latter. Sobran was shocked and hurt by the neocons’ attack on him when he dared to question the special relationship between America and Israel. This attack led to his progressively more outspoken criticism of Israel and the Jewish role in America.

In contrast to more critical obituaries, Rabbi Schiller says he will always remember his recently departed friend as a "disheveled intellectual who had a heart overflowing with love." Rabbi Schiller’s glowing endorsement is displayed prominently on Sobran’s publisher’s website.

Jean Raspail’s novel The Camp of the Saints was another major influence on Rabbi Schiller. At the Manhattan meeting, the Rabbi talked about how Raspail’s book underlined the fact that we have a common European identity, which includes such things as "the sense of critical thought, romance, heroism, individual integrity, and the spirituality of life". All of these were shaped by Greece, Rome, Judaism, Christianity, and the Norse lands.

Nowadays, the Rabbi commented, any sort of defense or even "public concern with the fate of European civilization is open to attacks from the thought police".

Like Thomas Molnar, Rabbi Mayer Schiller believes that there is no hope for Western man because he "had his soul torn out" and "internalized the terror" to such a degree that he is not only afraid to speak in defense of his civilization, but is even afraid to think pro-Western, politically incorrect thoughts.

As for the nationalist parties in Europe, the Rabbi does not have much hope for two reasons.

* First, as soon as a nationalist party will get above 10-15 % of the vote, the repressive apparatus of the EU will kick in and shut it down. (Indeed, this has already happened with Belgium’s Vlaams Blok and appears about to happen to the British National Party).
* Second, nationalist movements are very susceptible to fragmentation and internal squabbles. This tragic fragmentation is due to the fact that "movements that are out of power and have little hope of achieving it are forever substituting internal feuds for the reality of real power".

The Rabbi says witnessed this firsthand during the split of the National Front in Britain in the 1980s. He is still friends with former National Front leaders Patrick Harrington and David Kerr, whom he says have demonstrated a sense of sympathy towards the Jewish people.

On several occasions, the Rabbi visited Ulster where he attended the Twelfth Of July Unionist parade ("the last legitimate folk festival in the West and the only one without corporate sponsorship") and met with Reverend Ian Paisley. The Rabbi jokes that his affinity for both traditionalist Catholicism and Ulster unionism presents a big dilemma during Celtic-Rangers soccer games.

But all is not lost for the West. The Rabbi said that "the doctrine of multiculturalism and political correctness is so insane and against reality that it has to be enforced by terror". Therefore, the Rabbi asserted that, even when Western societies collapse after a long period of cultural and economic decline, there will still be remnants of religious Jews and Christians, as well as social traditionalists who will preserve Western civilization and values.

Rabbi Schiller urged the meeting to create "islands of sanity" similar to those envisioned by the French New Right, an important on influence on Rabbi Schiller’s thought, and carry the Western realm forth in our communities, homes, and hearts.

The last part of Rabbi Schiller’s speech dealt with the Jews and their relationship with the West. The Rabbi blames large-scale secular Jewish participation in the Left on the fact that when European Jews entered political life in the late 1800s, it was the Left that argued for emancipation. Therefore, secular Jews were trained for over a hundred years, to view those who had an "organic understanding and attachment to the Western realm" as a threat.

On the other hand, Orthodox Jews largely abide by a tribal morality. For most modern Orthodox Jews, this means that "it is all about Israel and support for Israel" and for most traditional Orthodox Jews, engagement with the outside world is only done to obtain benefits (government and otherwise) for their communities.